How to capture desktop screen shots?

Question

Recently i asked my colleague to help capture some screen shots for project documentation. But he told me that he can’t capture the screen shots without screen capture software. He only can capture the whole desktop screen but not active windows screen shots. Is there possible to do it without any screen capture tools assist?

Solution

Yes, sure it is. We can pressed the”PrntScrn” (print screen) key on our Windows keyboard to provide same functionality as you mention. Print screen button can capture whole desktop screen or current active windows screen shot to “clipboard” (windows temporary storage) and ready for us to paste into our favor graphics software for further editing, like cut and crop.

Here i show how to capture my whole desktop screen shot without any tools help.

1) Press the Print Screen key ([PrntScrn] or [PrtScn]) on your keyboard.

2) Open your favor graphic editor program like Ms Paint.

There have two ways to open it
a) Start –> Programs –> Accessories –> Paint
b) Type mspaint in command prompt.

3) Click Paste from menu option or CTRL + P to paste the captured screen into msPaint.
4) Edit the image (cut, crop and add text)
5) Click save as other image format , choose gif or jpg format.
5) Done, we had captured our whole desktop screen.

Here i show how to capture active windows screen shot without any tools help.

1) Hold the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen, it will only capture the current Active windows screen

The less of the steps are exactly same with what i mention above.

For Example,

Here is pressing Print Screen only, it capture whole desktop screen

Here is holding the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen, it only capture the current active windows.

Conclusion

If we just want a simple screen capture functionality, we do not need a screen capture software to do it, our Keyboard already provided this functionality to us.